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What if it wasn’t…
My heart pounds harder in my chest. My throat constricts, the small of my back growing clammy and slick.
What if that really was Gabriel going to Dwayne’s apartment that night, and if so, what possible reason would he have to be there?
My tongue feels too big for my mouth as I swallow. My mind starts to flip through disjointed memories of Gabriel boasting about his near-perfect win record. Of his disdain for the system that allows men like Dwayne Halbertson to walk on a technicality after committing heinous crimes.
What if there’s even more to his darkness than you know…
What if there’s more to it than I want to know about the man I married? The man who gets off on chasing me through the dark. The man who’s far stronger, deadlier and more agile than you’d ever guess seeing him in that Tom Ford suit with the three-hundred-dollar haircut. The man who knows how to hunt and stalk his prey. How to use a knife…
I’m going insane. I have to be. There’s no way…
I shake my head. But suddenly, another thought blinks into my mind. No, not a thought.
A name.
My hands shake as I Google Salvatore Avella—the disgraced administrator at a well-known private elementary school here in Manhattan who turned out to be a predator. Crown and Black represented a number of the victims and their families in that case pro bono.
If I remember correctly, the case got screwed royally because of a technicality involving mishandled evidence—and the arrest paperwork being filed incorrectly, too, I think.
Salvatore walked.
And then, a month later, he was murdered, gruesomely. I shiver as I remember Cassidy telling me about the bizarre crime scene where he’d been choked to death: a crime scene which included fingerprints and hair samples of celebrities—which you can buy from weirdos on eBay, I’ve checked—that made it all into one big black inside joke about strangulation and child predators.
I feel numb as I bring up the internal Crown and Black files on the case, though I already know what I’m going to find. Even so, when I read with my own eyes who the lead attorney was, I can feel the color drain from my face.
It was Gabriel.
Same as with Dwayne.
What the fuck…
For a second, I almost stop. I should slam my laptop shut, take a breath, and go outside to touch grass or something. Because I must seriously be losing my shit.
But I don’t stop. I pick up my phone and dig deeper.
“Hey, Chase? It’s Fumi.”
“Hey,” the firm’s resident tech support guy mutters. “What’s up?”
“We keep a record of all company phones, right?”
“Yep,” he grunts.
“Does that include GPS data?”
“Please, it includes the shit people look at in incognito mode.”
I take a deep breath. “Okay, well, do you think I could get the data dump from every company phone for a certain time frame on a certain date?”
Twenty agonizing minutes later, I get the file in my inbox. I’m still shaking as I export it to a spreadsheet which I sort by “active” status. Not everyone is using their company cell phones all the time, so that gets rid of half the firm right there. Then, I sort by phones that pinged data towers in Brooklyn in the specified time frame.
My heart thuds.
Now I’m down to twenty phones.
I breathe harder as I copy those phone locations onto a map. I zero in on Salvatore’s address, zooming in closer and closer, weeding out more and more numbers. Twenty drops to ten. To five. To three.
